The 5800 is part of Nokia's "Comes With Music" initiative, which gives you a year to download all the music you want  and lets you keep the tracks after the year is over.

If you live in the U.S. or Canada, you'll have to wait for Comes With Music, though. It isn't available here, though Nokia told us they're working on it. But the touch screen 5800 will be available by the end of the year for roughly $395 worldwide, including a U.S. version supporting AT&T's high-speed HSDPA network. T-Mobile users will enjoy EDGE and Wi-Fi connectivity.

The 5800 changes Nokia's mainstay Symbian Series 60 OS to make it friendlier to poke with your finger. It's got one of the highest-res screens available on a U.S. phone, at 640x360. That may sound like a weird resolution, but it's the same 16:9 aspect ratio as on HDTVs, potentially making the 5800 a good device for recording or watching video.

The long, lozenge-shaped phone has a look and interface similar to the Samsung Instinct's: big icons, virtual soft keys at the bottom of the screen, and drop-down menus. The home screen lets you highlight your four favorite contacts and track your history with them by clicking on them, like some of T-Mobile's MyFaves phones do.

We were able to play with a 5800 for a few minutes. The unit we used was pre-production, and that was clear: some interface elements were missing or blank. The browser crashed at one point, and rotating the screen seemed slow. That's to be expected from a phone that's not fully baked.

Nokia changed pretty much everything about interacting with Series 60. In the browser, for instance, you now drag with your finger and double-tap to zoom. (Generally, you single-tap to select things and double-tap to 'click' on them.) There's a much heavier use of big 'shortcut' icon buttons than on any Nokia phone before. A glowing icon on the upper right hand corner of the screen pops out the Media Bar, a set of quick-launch icons for the music player, video player, gallery, Web browser and a Nokia sharing service.

The 5800 offers four different kinds of text entry: a landscape QWERTY soft keyboard that takes up the whole screen, a phone-style keypad, a handwriting recognizer and an eensy-weensy, tiny QWERTY keyboard that only takes up part of the screen. That last one requires you to pull out the stylus, but it's a way to enter text while still looking at your Web page.

The touch screen is haptic, so the phone vibrates when you press a virtual key.

The phone's flagship feature is music support, but its music functions may play better overseas than here in the US and Canada. The 5800 comes with an 8GB MicroSD memory card for storage, powerful stereo speakers and support for protected WMA music, along with unprotected AAC and MP3 music. The top-ported stereo speakers (which point toward the top of the device, rather than the back, where they could be muffled by a tabletop) are quite loud. The phone has a 3.5-mm headphone jack, and also supports stereo Bluetooth. Nokia says the phone will get 35 hours of music playback on a charge.

All the interface changes mean that third-party app developers will have to recode their software; Nokia will put out a new SDK for the new Series 60 Version 5 when this phone comes out.

The 5800 will sync with Windows Media Player 11, but it looks like it will really come alive when it connects to Nokia's online music store  which Nokia said they're working on bringing here. Right now, the store is available in nine European countries, Singapore and Australia.

Nokia extends their Web-browsing leadership here with a WebKit-based browser that supports Flash, unlike many other smart phones. The device also has a 3.2-megapixel camera with 640x360, 30-frame-per-second video recording. A second small camera, on the front, lets the YouTube generation make videos of themselves.

The 5800 will try to compete against other touch-screen, media-centric smart phones like the Apple iPhone and Blackberry Storm. The big question is whether this unlocked device will provide the same quality experience that Apple can deliver with their iTunes/iPhone/App Store relationship, or that Blackberry can deliver with all of their carrier partnerships.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed...
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